Re: Meeting rooms

There's a meeting room at the office in Bracknell that got nicknamed The Fridge because everyone thinks it is too cold in there. I suspect it got partitioned off after the AC was set up, so gets cold air all the time.

Handy for me when I visit because a) I like it cold and b) no-one else ever books it.

Re: If we must have Surface-like machines..

> My experience with the Spectre X360 i7 version has been the worst

> of any piece of hardware I can recall in at least 2 decades.

You've not used a Pavilion X2 then.

2Gb RAM and an Atom X5 make for painful progress, 32Gb storage means you can't install OS upgrades without an external drive, plus a MicroSD slot that works fine until you actually try and use it, at which point it sometimes dismounts the card without warning.

Piece of junk.

Not as bad as a Dell Venue 8 though. 1Gb RAM that is mostly taken up with the Android-to-x86 translator, leaving not enough to do anything else with.

Re: Don't do much work then?

> Ever try using an Android device to do work?

Yep. I've sat in a coffee shop in Birmingham with a Nexus 7, monitoring our incoming ServiceNow queues and doling out incidents as they come in.

Once you persuade ServiceNow to not load the tablet interface there's not a lot you can't do, especially with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I wouldn't want to write JavaScript on a 8-inch screen, but you could if you *really* had to.

A Windows 10 machine with 2 gigs of RAM though? Forget it, it will spend it's life swapping bits of it's brain in and out once you've got Outlook. Skype and Chrome open.

Re: To save lives

> It will be excellent if ISIS' drone fleet get bricked soon.

Actually it may not be. Brick the COTS ones they're using now and they learn to build their own, using open source flight controllers and ESCs. They then have the knowledge to make something *way* more capable than DJI makes.

You want a beast that uses 8 motors (two in push-pull on each corner) and can lift a crate of beer? Have at it, the controller already supports it, the motors and ESCs are cheap.

In short: build yer own! It's more fun, and you end up with something better.

Isle Of Man

Just got back from a holiday on the Isle Of Man, first time trying out this free roaming malarky.

Tablet, phone and wireless router all roamed on Sure, which has just launched there. EE sent a 'Welcome to Guernsey' SMS, which got giggles from all the EE users on the ferry.

EE roamed onto the 4G network, Three got HSPA+. No problem with speed off either, but I wasn't exactly hammering it. It all just worked, apart from the router that took about 5 minutes to register itself the first time.

Re: Bah.

> external rail fitted with an infra-red homing missile

Missile's decision making process - "Shall I lock on to the tiny point that is a few degrees above ambient, or the giant ball of fire over there". Jet engines run rather hotter than drone motors, you'd end up shooting yourself down.

Trying to hit an Inspire 2 from a motorised 50-cal turret would make for better in-flight entertainment than any of the movies though.

Re: And how well, exactly....

Re: "whether the Navy should be abandoning low-tech backup solutions"

It's more about the mundane uses of a pocket tool for me.

Yes I could use my Leatherman to cut the seatbelt in a car wreck, but it's far more likely to be used for slicing a parcel open, cutting up fruit, cutting the top off an instant coffee packet with no perforations, chopping an errant branch off a bush that's about to take a layer of paint off the car. All things I've done with my Leatherman.

Numpty installers

An office where I used to work had a small room that housed the servers, network gear and phone system, and had a wall-mounted AC unit.

One day, we came in to find no servers and no phones. During the night the AC had died because the heat exchanger was a solid block of ice. The dead AC meant the servers rapidly heated the room up, the ice melted, dripping water into the phone system's main box which was mounted directly under the AC.

They may have uses (not to me, I don't like voice control generally) but they need to fix the authentication before I'll even consider getting one. A device that can be taken over by a random voice on TV has no place anywhere IMO.

At the very least the activation phrase should be customisable to anything, not just 'Alexa' or 'computer'.

Re: Meh, I give it a few months

"I love the way people scream monopoly over Microsoft then go all quiet when you mention goggle..."

The difference with ChromeOS is that they didn't take an existing OS and nobble it so you can't run Firefox or change the search engine, and there isn't a magic "pay $50 to turn it back on again" switch.

If Google wanted to screw you over with ChromeOS they could, they have full control over the OS. Lock the search engine down, and only pre-approved Chrome extensions allowed, so no AdBlock or uBlock.

I know what you mean,,,

My example is ServiceNow, It displays everything, then shuffles stuff into tabs if you have that enabled, then the UI policies kick in and hide stuff that shouldn't be there. Buttons and fields you're trying to click may not be even close when it actually registers the click.

It also had an annoying habit of putting an Insert button where Update used to be before it shuffled everything around. This means it creates a duplicate record instead of overwriting the old one if you click too early.

My pet peeve is menus that disappear because the mouse pointer is 1 pixel outside it's border. I click on your header to get you to display, just stay put until I select something!

Re: Whats the point of an autonomous tractor?

> Whats the point of an autonomous tractor?

It's more about efficiency than yield. GPS knows *exactly* where the tractor is so doesn't need to overlap to make sure the whole field gets ploughed/seeded/whatever, so diesel isn't wasted. The tractor will get pulled off course by ground variations, the GPS can spot that better than a human.

Dodgy keyboards

I got myself a Corsair mechanical keyboard, ages back.

Took it home, plugged it in, tried to log on to Windows - wrong password.

I started to wonder what sort of weird settings it was set to and how I was supposed to fix it. It was only when I watched the dots going into the password field that I noticed one was missing - problem turned out to be a dodgy switch under one key that happened to be part of the password.

Re: Not an Internet story

Re: Machine Operating System

Kinda.

Going back a bit so the details are a bit (a lot, actually) hazy. You could put a non-printable character in the disc name, which had the effect of stopping a directory listing at that point. With the appropriate text before that character you could display all sorts of nasty/scary/downright annoying messages, and lock people out unless they knew what file they needed to run.

It became a bit of a manual virus, it quickly spread around the discs for my school's BBCs.

Stock HSFs

The Intel HSFs aren't *that* bad. The Pentium G2120 in my VMWare server has been going more-or-less non-stop for over 3 years on the stock Intel fan, it's already killed the fan in one PSU.

I'm still using the stock HSF on my i7-6700 too. I've got a Corsair H-90 ready to go in, I only put the Intel one on to check the rest of the kit was working. One day I'll get around to taking it to bits and putting the Corsair in, but the Intel is coping well so far.

I've just broken their detector...

My streaming box that does iPlayer is connected via Ethernet, it doesn't touch the wireless network.

Technically they could try and get into the (encrypted) powerline Ethernet connection between the rooms, I understand those things leak a bit, but I would think they'd just move on to a softer target who was using wireless.

Even if the Shield TV was on the wireless network, good luck telling the traffic from Twitch or my local Plex server from an iPlayer stream.

Re: Maybe this will encourage popularizing low wattage cpu's

> An analysis of who uses power-hungry pc's, and why,

I have an i7-6700, 65w TDP. Thing is, if you use the internal graphics the entire machine pulls about 40w, up to about 60w with the GTX-750, at idle (which it is for most of it's life). My intention is to keep it for several years, rather than replacing an entry-level low-power job in a year or so because it's not quick enough,

The other thing is that it may use more power when working hard, but it will be working hard for less time than a less powerful low-power CPU, so it evens out and may even come out ahead.

Re: Submarines

An MAD detects the effect the sub has on the Earth's mag field. If you can plot it accurately you can hide a sub in natural field disturbances, e.g. from big metal deposits in the crust.

Same with thermal detection and SONAR, both get affected by thermal layers in the water. If you can plot (or predict) that you can hide.

You can detect the sound the hull makes moving through the water, and the props. A diesel-electric can stop and turn everything off, and make like a hole in the water, a nuke needs to keep certain bits running or the reactor will go Chernobyl on you.

That explains it

I was down to the backup, backup connection for a while - PlusNet dead, the 3G card in the laptop had no signal, so I was on the MiFi router.

Anyone seeing flaky DNS for a while this morning too? It looked like external DNS servers were being being blocked, I could ping 8.8.8.8 but got no name resolution. I was about to ring them and have a rant and it started working again.